Johannesburg, 15 Nov 2005
Buffalo City Municipality has successfully reduced its administration requirements, improved its reporting capabilities, and increased visibility of its costs, revenue and profit across the organisation with the implementation of Hyperion Intelligence. The product was implemented late last year in conjunction with Intellient, the local distributor of Hyperion.
Buffalo City uses the Hyperion query and analysis dashboard tool to aggregate its data, generate a highly summarised view of the city and improve the reporting capabilities of the city`s directors and managers.
"Hyperion Intelligence provides our users with the capability to drill down to the lowest level possible, giving them access to information that can be used to investigate problem areas in the region, flag issues that may result in problems later on, or gather intelligence from sectors that are doing well," says Alistair Hofert, management accountant at Buffalo City Municipality. "The solution successfully addresses our need to focus the views of our directors and managers onto problem areas while avoiding overloading them with information."
Under continued development, the tool is expanded every month to include new data types. It is used to undertake Web-based reporting, thereby enabling the automatic distribution of data across the organisation and reducing the administration demands that typically accompany paper-based reporting.
Licensed for 30 users, the solution is used in conjunction with ALG Software`s Enterprise Performance Optimisation Suite, which is a set of fully integrated, Web-based software applications that include Predictive Planning, a real-time planning and budgeting software solution capable of single-click re-forecasting; and Activity Analysis, an activity-based management tool for cost and profitability management.
"Predictive Planning is used by the municipality to handle a range of corporate performance management processes, including operational planning and budgeting, scenario simulation, cost and profitability analysis, shared services costing, capacity management and performance measurement in one environment," Hofert says. "Activity Analysis is used by the city for faster data collection and reporting."
Having moved from the old and tired legacy mainframe environment it was running before the implementation of Hyperion Intelligence, Buffalo City now benefits from faster decision-making and modelling capabilities, increased visibility and improved data summaries.
Running on an HP Dual Xeon 3.4GHz environment with radio LAN networks, Hyperion Intelligence is used by directors and managers located throughout the city`s 80 buildings.
"The tool`s flexible, graphical development environment enables the city`s IT administrators to develop dynamic, customised information dashboards for all levels of users to analyse and view data with increased ease and speed," says Marc Scheepbouwer, MD of Intellient. "Now, when questions are asked or scenarios created, there is no latency in obtaining answers and information received has a great degree of integrity. The speed at which information can be disseminated throughout the organisation once it has been processed into reports is also greatly increased. Knowing what makes its business successful and where things are falling short is crucial to driving the municipality`s continued successful performance."
Hyperion Intelligence is used extensively for monthly financial reporting and has enabled an improved understanding of how the city`s work impacts on the region it manages.
Training is performed internally, while Intellient provides the necessary support for the solution. Based on the success of Hyperion Intelligence in Buffalo City to date, the municipality plans to boost the number of users of the solution and so increase the dashboard and business intelligence footprint across the organisation.
Spanning the 2 500 square kilometres of the Amatole District in the Eastern Province, the boundaries of Buffalo City Municipality include East London, King Williams Town and Bisho. The city employs more than 5 000 people to ensure the smooth running of this region.
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